Elisabeth Bekers (Free University of Brussels VUB, Belgium), “The Literary Legacy of Olaudah Equiano: Chika Unigwe’s
The Black Messiah (2013) as Postcolonial Biofiction”
The contemporary fictional genre of the neo-slave narrative, as the label suggests, revisits the original slave narratives of the 18th and 19th centuries that detailed the harrowing life experiences of (former) slaves, often in explicit support of the abolitionist movement. Neo-slave narratives imagine the lives of fictional slave characters as they might have been led, but occasionally draw inspiration from a life that was actually led. One of the best known examples is undoubtedly Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), based on the story of Margaret Garner, the escaped Kentucky slave who killed her daughter rather than see the little girl returned to slavery. More recently, white Scottish author James Robertson’s 2003 novel Joseph Knight fictionalized the lives of the eponymous historical Jamaican slave and his Scottish master John Wedderburn, against whom Knight filed a freedom suit.
In her most recent novel Black Messiah, currently only available in Dutch translation (Zwarte Messias, 2013), the Nigerian-born Chika Unigwe has the audacity to revisit the well (self-)documented life of fellow Igbo Olaudah Equiano. In 1991 Black British author Caryl Phillips, too, drew on Equiano’s experiences to create the testimony of the educated field slave Cambridge, but although the novel is named after the slave, it is largely devoted to Emily, the daughter of Cambridge’s master. Unigwe, by contrast, focuses almost exclusively on Equiano, transforming her neo-slave narrative into a biofictional tribute that delves deep into the heart of this important 18th-century activist and literary figure. In my paper I will demonstrate that Unigwe’s contemporary rewriting of Equiano’s life history does not, as do most neo-slave narratives, simply increase current audiences’ awareness of the horrors of slavery. Told largely by Equiano himself, Unigwe’s biographical novel also seeks to offer insight into the more perplexing aspects of Equiano’s life, such as his marriage to a white Englishwoman and especially his own involvement in the slave trade. In my discussion, I will examine to what extent Unigwe’s biographical novel Black Messiah presents a critical postcolonial reading of Equiano’s autobiographical Interesting Narrative, a text that itself challenged Western historiographical and ethnographical accounts of (enslaved) Africans.
Stephen Clingman (University of Massachussetts, USA), “Writing the Biofictive: Caryl Phillips and
The Lost Child”
There is a sense in which Caryl Phillips’s fiction has always had a biographical bent. There is so much focus on individual life histories in his characters, yet if the biographical mode is present, his work also explores its limits: what can be known, what cannot, what can and cannot be said. Classic examples might be Eva in The Nature of Blood, or Gabriel/Solomon in A Distant Shore. Phillips has also written works classified as non-fiction, where biography lies at the heart: John Ocansey’s story in The Atlantic Sound, or David Oluwale’s in Foreigners. Here too, though, the biographical is split by the unknown/untold, while the formal properties of these works shift the narrative in the direction of the fictive. So the fictive, non-fictive, and the biographical exist along a spectrum whose staging posts are not mutually exclusive but interactive and syntactic. There is also a sense in which the autobiographical – some of the underlying structures of Phillips’s own life and experiences – are melded into these forms, which adds a fourth element. All of this is repeated and raised to a higher level in The Lost Child, where we have a fictional biography (Monica), as well as a biographical character (Emily Brontë), whose lives commune across time and space. The Brontë figure is particularly intriguing, insofar as her life feeds into her fiction, and both feed into the novel: a meta-level of the biofictive. Some of the larger theoretical resonances may be apparent in the wider context of Phillips’s work: a biofictive form that uncouples oppositions between the factive/fictive, the author/character, and putative oppositions between the diasporic, postcolonial and transnational.
Marc Delrez (University of Liège, Belgium), “From the Commandant to the Colonel: Representations of Authority in the Work of Richard Flanagan”
In view of the often unapologetically political orientation of biographical fiction, which frequently flouts historical facts in order to gesture towards a ‘more substantive truth’ (Lackey 2017: 10) inseparable from a possibly anachronistic, contemporary perspective on the past, it was perhaps inevitable that, in Australia, the genre would become embroiled in the discursive turmoil of the History Wars. One thinks of the controversy surrounding the publication in 2005 of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, in which the novelist investigates the biography of her own great-great-great grandfather Solomon Wiseman as an attempt to re-create a sense of the socioeconomic and psycho-political conditions which informed, and facilitated, frontier violence at the time of the British settlement of Australia. This led to vigorous interventions by a number of academic historians, prominent among them Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen, who insisted that an epistemological ‘ravine’ really separates the novelist from the historian as the latter bears a responsibility to fact, making anathema any manipulation of the archive around biased present-day preoccupations or political sensibilities.
Arguably, the value of the heated public debates about these questions lies above all in what they reveal about the contested, slippery quality of Australia’s national past(s). This is the fraught context in which an established novelist such as Richard Flanagan, too, chose to espouse the genre of ‘biofiction’. After Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), which had already invented an alternative, imaginative life for the Van Diemonian convict and naturalist painter James Buelow Gould, Wanting (2008) revolves around the role played in Van Diemen’s Land by the celebrated explorer and Governor of the island, Sir John Franklin, and by his wife Lady Jane who, after her husband’s disappearance in the course of his quest for the fabled Northwest Passage, turns to Charles Dickens for help. Finally, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014) fictionalizes Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, an army officer renowned for his leadership in WWII, in a way which again demonstrates the author’s reliance on historical figures when peopling his fictional universe. It will be shown that, beyond the now well-rehearsed narration of the decimation and demise of the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples, Flanagan’s reconstruction of history includes an intent focus on figures of authority – whether artistic, political, or moral – which reads as an index of his wish to pick the padlock of historiography and gesture towards a heterogeneous scale of temporality relevant to the present of Australia.
Maria Cristina Fumagalli (University of Essex, UK), “‘Not walled facts, their essence’: Derek Walcott’s
Tiepolo’s Hound and Camille Pissarro”
Life-writing has always played an important role in Derek Walcott’s work, from Another Life (1973), his autobiography in verse, to his play Walker (1993, rewritten in 2001 and published in 2002) where he provides a fictional account of the last day in the life of the nineteenth-century abolitionist David Walker. Biographical and autobiographical impulses are combined in Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) where Walcott’s life rhymes with his biography of the impressionist painter Jacob Camille Pissarro who was born in the Caribbean island of St Thomas in 1830. The poem highlights important moments in the life of the nineteenth-century painter (his decision to leave St Thomas with Fritz Melbye, his collaboration with Paul Cézanne, the ‘Affaire Dreyfus’, the death of his daughter Jeanne) but ‘creation’ (what ‘might have happened’) shapes Walcott’s life-writing as much as ‘re-creation’ (what ‘actually’ happened). Walcott’s Pissarro, in fact, is an individual immersed in a set of historical networks but also a figure at the centre of a web of imagined relations. These illuminate the post/colonial condition vis-à-vis what Walcott calls the ‘empire of arts’ and enable the poet to articulate his reflections on the politics and poetics of life-writing and the nature, value and purpose of it.
Marie Herbillon (University of Liège, Belgium), “Rewriting Dostoevsky: J.M. Coetzee’s
The Master of Petersburg and the Perverted Truths of Biographical Fiction”
Published in 1994, The Master of Petersburg, J.M. Coetzee’s first post-apartheid novel, gives pride of place to a tutelary figure of the Western novel, namely Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this text, the South African (now Australian) novelist opens up a dialogue with the life and work of his Russian counterpart, whose poetics prompted M.M. Bakhtin to coin the term ‘dialogism’. If many aspects of Dostoevsky’s life are recognisable (such as the Siberian exile resulting from the author’s revolutionary activities, his epilepsy or his successive marital relationships with Maria Isaeva and Anna Snitkina), Coetzee, who notoriously lost his twenty-three-year-old son in 1989, chooses, however, to depart from biographical fact in important regards: for example, as opposed to Coetzee’s fictional suggestion, Dostoevsky never travelled to Petersburg after his stepson Pavel Isaev’s death, since he was actually survived by the latter. Crucially, Coetzee also engages with some well-known Dostoevskian narratives, in particular The Possessed (alternatively translated as The Devils or Demons), a censored section of which is reworked into the closing chapter of his own novel.
This paper will examine how The Master of Petersburg, whose dialogical confrontation with the Russian master yields an extensive reflection on the notion of filiation, can also be read both as a critique of censorship (one that acquires peculiar significance when considered in a postcolonial context) and, more broadly, as a meditation on writing (auto/biographical writing more specifically) conceived as a liminal space that tends to erode the boundary line between the private and the public: intimate though it may be, the act of writing is indeed likely to involve a betrayal of privacy – a necessary perversion of auto/biography arguably aiming to achieve a superior form of truth through imaginative literature.
Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol, UK), “When is Biography Fiction? Life Writing, Epistemophilia and the Limits of Genre in Contemporary African Writing”
It has become something of a commonplace in postcolonial criticism to draw a correspondence between the reading of postcolonial literatures, broadly construed, and the readerly drive towards epistemophilia, that is, a desire, or quest, for knowledge. Graham Huggan, for instance, has written that postcolonial writers, as positioned within the literary marketplace, straddle the line between acting as ‘representers of culture’ and ‘cultural representatives’. For Huggan, ‘this representativeness [which postcolonial writers face is] a function of their inscription in the margins, of the mainstream demand for an “authentic”, but readily translatable, marginal voice’. In this paper, I take these remarks as my premise, applying them to the case of contemporary African writing in English. The epistemophilic drive, I argue, takes on a particularly intensified valence in the context of African cultural production, complicated by Africa’s interpellation into what Simon Gikandi has characterised as ‘the schemata of difference’, what Achebe once referred to as the ‘image of Africa’ in the transnational global imaginary. At the heart of the epistemophilic reading of African literature are a series of assumptions around readerly and authorly location; circuits of production and consumption; the questions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘representation’, all of which function against the background of what Pascale Casanova once termed ‘the world republic of letters’.
In this paper, I interrogate the limits of this framework through the examples of biographical fiction, reportage and life writing produced on the African continent. Foregrounding questions of genre – particularly those which pertain to the porous borders between ‘fiction’, ‘non-fiction’ and ‘testimony’ as narrative forms – this paper juxtaposes a range of disparate literary material which evokes, in some way, issues around biography at both the individual and collective levels. Drawing on examples including Billy Kahora’s The True Story of David Munyakei; Kwani? 5; Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place and more, I explore the relationship between these ostensibly factual accounts and literary writing; authenticity and voice; author and audience; and the extent to which these texts de-centre the drive towards a single account of African experience.
Michael Lackey, (University of Minnesota, USA), “Irish Biofiction and the Political Project of Transatlantic Unslaving”
The biographical novel is significantly different from the historical novel, because instead of inventing a protagonist that symbolizes the forces that make major historical collisions possible, it bases the narrative on an actual historical figure, which the biographical novelist then converts into a symbol that functions to illuminate the past as well as the present.
In the first part of this lecture, I will clarify why the biographical novel came into being and what it is uniquely capable of representing and accomplishing. Historical novelists focus mainly on the deterministic and mechanistic forces that structure consciousness, while biographical novelists, who consider the deterministic and mechanistic models important but limited and reductive, also foreground a surreal dimension of consciousness, which cannot be subsumed within a deterministic and mechanistic model. For biographical novelists, the surreal dimension of consciousness plays a crucial role in making major historical collisions possible, so to represent history effectively, they have to manage, negotiate, and sometimes blend the deterministic and the surreal, realism and surrealism.
In the second part of this paper, I will discuss the unique contribution that biofiction can make to postcolonial studies. To do this, I will focus on Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt, two novels that address the confused, complicated and conflicted response by the Irish to colonialism, nationalism, and postcolonialism.
Giulia Mascoli (University of Liège, Belgium), “Musical(ized) Biographies: Jackie Kay’s
Trumpet and Caryl Phillips’s
Dancing in the Dark”
My paper deals with two musical(ized) biographies: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) and Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark (2005). These literary works share features, at once thematic, since the protagonist is a musical performer, and formal, as both writers’ prose is drenched with musicality. The two narratives can thus be considered what Emily Petermann (2014) calls “musical novels”, as both display sonic and structural patterns as well as elements of improvisation (the imitation of orality; the use of different narrators and the inclusion of various types of texts such as lyrics, interviews, excerpts from newspapers, and the solo performances through improvised jazzy breaks and the repetition of the same lexical item).
In my paper, I will take my cue from Eric Prieto, who writes that interart analogies should not be taken as ends in themselves, and I will try to show the purpose of such intermediality and how it can contribute to the biographical genre. Among other things, I will examine whether these musicalized biographies have, through their unusual forms, particular social and political relevance and how approaching them from this methodological angle can serve as interpretative aid.
Russell McDougall (University of New England, Australia), “Imperial and Postcolonial Fictions of Pauline Bonaparte”
Most British and European accounts of Pauline Bonaparte – biographical ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ alike – obsess over her beauty and alleged corrupt sexuality. Some speculate about an incestuous relationship with her brother, the first French Emperor. She appears accordingly as the ravishing Venus of the Napoleonic Empire – flirtatious, ambitious, scandalous, notorious. Commentators have at times seemed almost resentful of the scholarship and narrative skill devoted to writing the life of an unworthy subject. This paper compares European biographies and biographical fictions of Pauline with postcolonial (mostly Caribbean) revisionary fictions of her as the Creole Princess of the Americas.
Her first husband, General Victor Emmanuel Leclerc (the Blond Bonaparte, as he was known), led the disastrous campaign to put down the slave rebellion and restore French rule on Saint Domingue. His failure – and his death – sealed his fate as a historical protagonist to be either mocked or ignored, a pawn sacrificed by French folly in the Americas. But Pauline apparently flourished there...
Texts for discussion include Michel Moran’s The Second Empress (2012); Flora Fraser’s Venus of Empire: The Life of Pauline Bonaparte (2009); Pierson Dixon’s The Glittering Horn: Secret Memoirs of the Court of Justinian (1958); Hector Fleischmann’s Pauline Bonaparte and Her Lovers (1914); Edgar Maass’s Imperial Venus (1946); Catherine Delors’s For the King (2010); Lorenzo Borghese’s The Princess of Nowhere (2010); Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808); Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) (1949); Madison Smartt Bell’s The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004); Christopher Hebert’s The Boiling Season (2012); Nick Lake’s In Darkness (2012); Mimi Barthélémy’s La Cocarde d’ebene [The Ebony Cockade] (1989); and Derek Walcott’s The Haytian Earth (1984).
Delphine Munos (University of Liège, Belgium), “Semper incertus: Authorization through Uncertainty in Hanif Kureishi’s
My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father”
In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette discusses “the centrality of questions of biography in reception of postcolonial texts” (173). She argues that, as against “the supposed dominant orthodoxy of anti-authorialism in literary studies” (173), successful marketing of postcolonial literature depends on – indeed requires – “biographical authenticity” so that postcolonial writers can figure valid interpreters of an authenticated location for an Anglo-American audience “schooled in multiculturalism.”
Brouillette’s perception that the marketing of postcolonial writing depends on the coincidence between literary material and the biographical self of its author raises fascinating questions when it comes to examining ‘postcolonial’ biographies and autobiographies already relying on a “referential pact” (cf. Lejeune) because of their generic anatomy. Biographical fiction, then is a postcolonial nightmare come true, as the specificities of the genre endlessly displace the demand for “biographical authenticity” that is seen by Brouillette to condition the niche marketing of postcolonial literature.
This paper looks at Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father (2004), in which the popular British Asian author narrativizes his ambivalent relationship with his father and retraces his father’s life from British India to the UK of the 1960s and 1970s. What is interesting is that Kureishi both relies on memory and on two unpublished ‘fictional’ texts by his late father to reconstruct the latter’s life, thus “imagining around [others’] imagination” (2004: 238), as he phrases it, that is, embracing fiction – not only memory – as a valid starting point for representing the life of his father. Susie Thomas writes that “It is a major irony that Kureishi, as a reader, approaches his father’s novels in a way that he would doubtless object to if his own fiction were raided for its autobiographical content” (2006: 189). My claim is that this “major irony” becomes a means, for Kureishi, of authorizing himself a place outside the ‘British Asian ghetto’ by playing up to the expectations of postcolonial niche marketing.
Ranka Primorac (University of Southampton, UK), “Zambian Lives and the Values for Our Time”
The paper focuses on Zambia’s first entrepreneurial self-help manual (and local best-seller), Business Values for our Time by the Zambian financial columnist and public figure, Chibamba Kanyama. Self-published in 2010, Kanyama’s volume has a pronounced auto/biographical component: it tells the life stories of its own author and a number of other actually-existing Zambians, in order to help local readers find entrepreneurial success in a recently liberalised market economy. The book does not aspire to the status of fiction; on the contrary, it stresses the referentiality of the life stories it contains as a key aspect of its potential economic and political usability. Yet it is easily positioned on a local genre spectrum that does not firmly separate the documentary/practical usability of texts from their aesthetic functioning, and it shares textual traits with key works of Zambian fiction in English. The paper offers a reading of Kanyama’s text as a national allegory, analyses the role of life-writing within it, and examines the implications of describing it as an example of peripheral postmodernism.
Rebecca Romdhani (University of Liège, Belgium), “Biofiction and Possession: Jeanne Duval and François Mackandal in Nalo Hopkinson’s
The Salt Roads”
Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative fiction novel, The Salt Roads (2003), features three women: Jeanne Duval (Baudelaire’s mistress), Thais (Saint Mary of Egypt), and the fictional enslaved woman, Mer, in Haiti; their narratives are related predominantly in the first person. The African and Haitian deity Ezili frames their stories, often interjecting within them, and occasionally narrates them. This paper will posit that Ezili functions in this novel as a fictional biographer of black women’s lives. Thus, biofictions of historical persons are likened to spirit possession.
What is more, the stories of Jeanne Duval and Thais are contrasted with the purely fictional account of Mer, who herself relates her interactions with the historical Haitian Maroon leader, François Mackandal. Ezili explains that when she possesses Jean and Thais she is trapped within their “soul cages” without the ability to see and experience other black lives at the same time. In contrast, she communicates spiritually with Mer and only possesses her on the one occasion in which Mackandal is himself possessed by Ogu, another African deity/fictional biographer.
My argument is that metafictional elements in this text show how black women in history have often become recorded for posterity only because of their interactions with white men who have preserved and distorted their memory through either art/literature (Baudelaire) or biography (the male writings on the Catholic saints). Ezili’s commentary on these historical women shows the restrictions that men’s recorded “facts” can have on even fictional biography. Furthermore, the battle that commences in the book between Ezili and Ogu over the possession of Mackandal does not merely symbolize the historical emphasis placed on male lives, it interrogates the preference for recounting the lives of those who fought back against slavery rather than those who enabled others to survive.
Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University, UK), &ldquoPerforming Ellen: Mojisola Adebayo’s
Moj of the Antarctic (2006) and
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860)”
Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic constructs a complex relationship with an already complex narrative. It wrests Ellen Craft from her husband’s 1860’s (auto-)biographical text but, rather than using the performance to present William’s ‘Ellen’ with an interiority his narrative scarcely offers her, it reconstitutes Ellen, relocates her and re-voices her as Moj. The play is thus a figurative biography of Ellen Craft, a ‘call and response’ production, originating and reflecting an ‘intimate, somatic engagement with the body of another’ (Pineau 2003: 41-3). Central to both texts is the concept of identity as embodied performance. The Crafts self-consciously perform, and even celebrate their multiple selves, presenting in their narrative what Adebayo describes as one of many ‘queer stories’ that have existed but have been hidden in African and African diasporic history (142). Ellen Craft’s story is further ‘queered’ in Adebayo’s performance by her relocation in Antarctica: thus the daring ambition that prompted the Crafts’ flight from the American South to England, via Boston and Nova Scotia, then back to Georgia, USA, is re-imagined in a twenty-first century context as travel to a remote, and as yet unsettled and un-colonised space. Ellen Craft’s gendered passing, through cross-dressing and the paraphernalia of debility, is underscored in Adebayo’s performance with a violence that marks the original narrative but not its protagonists. And Ellen’s sexuality is reconfigured, so that her lover May, in Moj of the Antarctic, is substituted for her husband, William Craft.
As a performance of Ellen Craft’s flight from slavery, Moj of the Antarctic transgresses multiple borders, and in the process subverts expectations of what constitutes an authentic self. Using Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performance and Smith and Watson’s extension of Butler in their theorising of women’s autobiography as performance, as well as more specific examples of work that focuses on auto/biographical performance, my aim in this presentation is to further disrupt the ‘intimate’ relationship between texts and selves in Adebayo’s performance, uncovering the bodily entanglements of the palimpsest text, its effacement, and twenty-first century re-production.
Louise Yelin (Purchase College, CUNY, USA), “Creolizing Lives: The Biographical Impulse in the Work of Isaac Julien”
In this illustrated talk, I discuss several of Isaac Julien’s films and installations – Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, Paradise Omeros, Looking for Langston, True North, and Derek – as versions of biography, which Hermione Lee elegantly defines as “the story of a person told by someone else.” Throughout, I draw on Julien’s notion of creolization as an “oscillation effect” that moves people from one space to another. Tracing the vicissitudes of the biographical impulse in Julien’s oeuvre, I argue that he at once “creolizes” his subjects and portrays them as agents, not just objects, of creolization. Most of Julien’s biographical works – indeed, most of the works he’s made since Looking for Langston (1989) – eschew linear chronology and the conventions of plot and character associated with biography and its cinematic cousin, the bio/pic. Rather, I’ll argue, Julien interrogates his subjects, decenters them, fractures them, refashions them, pays homage to them, revises standard accounts of their lives, conflates them with others, sets them in multiple spatial and temporal orders, and sometimes disappears them altogether from the scene. Elaborating an aesthetic of displacement by foregrounding the vicissitudes and varieties of biography, I’ll suggest, these pivotal works look back at Julien’s early films and anticipate the multiscreen installations he’s made in recent years and continues to produce.
9.30-10.00 Welcome
